Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm hoping you might be able to solve my problem: my company has two sites, one domain that we bought 18 months ago and an older site that carried the name of one of our brands in the domain name.
We wanted to use the new domain to showcase all our brands (6 in total) and gradually this site has worked its way up the rankings so it now appears on page 1 or 2 of Google for a fair number of our search terms - however, only 12 pages (of approx 450) appear in Google's index and none of our daily news stories ever seem to get indexed.
The original site was left 'fallow' for a while but a couple of months ago my boss decided he wanted to reinvigorate the old brand, so I rebuilt the site - we now also load up the daily news stories from site 1 on to this site.
Here's the problem - when I input 'site:www.site1.com' in google I get 12 pages found. This never seems to change and they are always the same 12 pages. When I input 'site:www.site2.com' I now get 80 pages (of approx 120), including two months worth of news stories - this is a site that had no content or visitors two months ago...
Site 2 contains the same daily news articles that site 1 contains but gets them indexed. Site 1 contains the original news stories, plus lots of additional original content but only gets 12 indexed.
Fingers crossed you great guys and gals can shed some light...!
It sounds like a few different factors may be interacting to create the situation. The most important may be how Google handles duplicate content across different domains.
The bottom line is that Google doesn't want to give visitors two versions of the exact same thing in any search result, so they filter out all but one version. Age of the domain where the copies appear can be an important factor in deciding which version to filter.
When you only see 12 pages for the new domain's site: operator results, do those results end with a link that says something about "...repeat the search with the omitted results included?"
Assuming this is the case... it's natural that the old site, site2, would have inbound links already established, whereas on site1, your new site, your inbound links and trust factors may yet to be developed.
It also sounds like you're putting up the same content on both sites. This isn't a good idea. Google doesn't like to display duplicate content, and where duplicate content is indexed, it will generally display the content with the highest page rank. In this case, Google would most likely therefore favor content on your older site.
You might want to run your site:site1.com query again (I generally don't use the www in a site query)... and then... in your address window (not in the search window) add &filter=0, and click the Go button or right-facing arrow on the right side of the window, and see if you get a different set of results. This string displays duplicate content which Google has indexed but has filtered as duplicate content.
If the content isn't getting indexed at all, then the newness of your new site, lack of inbound links, interlinking of the two sites, or possibly structural factors within the new site, could also be at play.
Again, though, the dupe content is most likely at the core of the problem.
I'll try pointing the content from site2 to site1
Would you clarify what you mean by this. Every time I see the word "pointing" I wonder what is meant by it. There's no standard definition, but I've seen that what is described as "pointing" quite often leads to problems.
